A bubbling measles outbreak in the upstate of South Carolina has forced 153 unvaccinated children out of the classroom and into quarantine for a minimum of 21 days.
In Minnesota, where a small outbreak has been growing for the last month, 118 students are also under quarantine in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area after being exposed to the highly contagious virus, health officials said Friday.
The restrictions mean three weeks of remote learning as parents monitor for fever, rash and other symptoms.
“Communities are having to bear the price of quarantining so many children,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Expect more of the same. This is going to happen more and more frequently.”
Active, ongoing transmissions
On Thursday, the South Carolina Department of Public Health said that a measles case had been diagnosed in Greenville County, without any known link to seven other cases in neighboring Spartanburg County.
“What this new case tells us is that there is active, unrecognized community transmission of measles occurring,” Dr. Linda Bell, state epidemiologist for the South Carolina Department of Public Health, said during a press briefing Thursday.
The South Carolina cases have been identified in two schools (one elementary school and one charter school with students from kindergarten through 12th grade).
Unvaccinated children who were exposed to the virus will be “excluded” from school for three weeks, the length of time it could take for a measles exposure to cause symptoms, Bell said.
“Those measures will help us be effective in preventing the spread of measles virus in those schools and in our communities,” she said.
According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.
